Elaine Hampton: We're judging teachers with inaccurate measurements

There is an old story about a farmer worried about his pigs not growing, so he weighed them and weighed them. Just kept weighing them.

Secretary Hanna Skandera and the New Mexico Public Education Department take that logic one step lower. They assume that our students and teachers are not doing well, and they weigh them and weigh them (some 40 percent of class time sitting for tests), using a scale that was designed to measure crop increase — something like pig fat, not academic progress.

I have hundreds of files on school testing from my 20 years research on the topic, and no research supports using this kind of standardized, high-stakes testing. Even the American Statistical Association does not support the model used to measure the teachers.

Measuring the students in New Mexico is excessive, punitive, and poorly designed.

No matter. The state's education department still uses the results from these inaccurate measurements as a measure of the teachers' quality.

Then it gets worse.

A teacher of math may find that her scores are based on some other teacher's language arts scores.

A band teacher may be judged on math scores from some scattering of students, many of whom are not his own.

That teacher who works with struggling students and gets them interested in learning and making progress has to test the students in a way that is not right for the kids, and, guess what? They don't score as high as the state thinks they should. Bad teacher.

The teacher working with students in gifted programs doesn't show much growth because the kids have always scored at the top. Bad teacher.

Maybe the teacher makes it through all of those broken and barbed scales, but his child was ill and he had to take several days off. His score drops. Bad teacher.

Guess where this all came from? From the political idea that wants to paint public education with the bad-teacher and ignorant-student brush so that private enterprise can take over and get the money. As Rupert Murdoch said, "When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone."

This is not conspiracy theory.

A simple Internet search shows how conservative think tanks like ALEC created a list of state education policies to privatize our public education. Then they pass this list out to the governors, Republican and Democratic, who blindly adopt the policies and force them on their schools.

Giant corporations like Pearson rub their palms together and grin as they sell millions of dollars' worth of testing services, materials, and computer systems designed just for testing.

And then they give lots of money back to politicians who support their plan to keep it in motion.

The result of this shift away from public education is that we become like so many developing countries, where lots of money goes to a few elite private schools for wealthy families, and public education struggles with the left-overs to try to give the other 90 percent a fair chance on an out-of-balance scale of justice.

Providing good education is hard. You try to keep 30 kids happy and academically productive for seven hours straight.

Our public education system needs improvement; but overall, with the right resources and support, it does the job quite well.

My thanks to the good teachers who are enduring these insults and teaching our children.

Elaine Hampton, Ph.D., a past teacher in Las Cruces schools and professor at UTEP, is a writer and researcher in border-area education.